Im stephen sackur. Its always dangerous to generalise about the human impulse to create art, but it does seem its often linked to the experience of dark, painful places. My guest today is a renowned poet and playwright, whose writing and performances lay bare his own intimate wounds. Lemn sissay was abandoned as a baby, rejected by his foster family, abused in Public Institutions of care. He has since been on a quest to understand his past, and piece together his identity. Along the way, he found a remarkable poetic voice. How . Lemn sissay, welcome to hardtalk. Hi, stephen. You are a writer, a poet, but you are also a public performer. One is very solitary, one by definition is clearly public. Which is the more authentic, comfortable you 7 you know, i think theyre both authentic, and both comfortable. You need to. You need to you need to be alone to write, and to explore, and to find the sort of chemical compound of the poem. And you need to read on stage, so that that chemical compound blows into fireworks, and sheds light. You know. And as for poetry, as opposed to other art forms youve done other things, and in particular you have written quite a lot of plays. But i think you have said poetry is your truest self, the voice that lives at the back of your mind. Is there Something Special for you about poetry . As a child, poetry was a place where i could find a familial resonance. In other words, when i had no family, as a child, the writing of poetry would act as memory, so that i could identify where id been, who id been with, what i felt, at any given sort of time in my childhood. And thats really what family does, and in lieu of that, poetry allowed me to have a place to look back at and say, oh, i was there, then. You mean, and i dont want to be too literal, but poems are almost like your surrogate family . Exactly. If family is a collection of disputed memories between one group of people over a lifetime which i didnt have, i didnt have anyone to dispute the memory, memory is an essential part of family. And my poems were a memory of any given event in my life. Well, you have introduced already to thoughts about your childhood, and it colours so much of your writing, and i guess your take on the world, really what you went through as a child, as a young one. So i do want to talk about it a little bit. And, for people who dont know your story, i mean, your mum was a young ethiopian woman, who came to the uk to study, i think. She came in the expansion of ethiopia through the Emperor Haile selassie, who was sending out students across the world, to get education and then to and feed back into the growth of ethiopia. It was a very exciting time in ethiopia, at that time. Was she pregnant, actually, when she arrived . Good question. Im not sure she was pregnant when she arrived. I think i was conceived quite literally in the journey. Interesting. But here she was, a young woman in a new country, an alien culture, trying to find her place. And she then found herself pregnant, had the baby, and clearly decided she could not live her life with this baby, at this particular time, and decided to give it up. You, of course. Women are incredible, 0k . And the act of giving a child away to be fostered or adopted is to me the action of a heroine. And what my mother did, she asked me to be fostered for a short period of time, while she studied, so she could then take me back to ethiopia. Say, a year, a year and a half . The social worker gave me to foster parents and said, treat this as an adoption. He is yours forever. His name is norman. That was a fundamental deception which changed the course of your life. It utterly changed the course of my life, yes. So my foster parents took me and they said, were your parents now, and were your parents forever. And i thought they were my mum and dad. They grew up in the north of england. In a very, it has to be said, white, fairly insular community, where you were this brown skinned baby, and a complete sort of novelty, an alien to many of the people in the community. The first time i met a black person, i was nine years of age. So the foster parents held me there, and said that they were mine forever. And at 12 years of age, they put me in a Childrens Home and said that they would never contact me again, and didnt. You know, you have had years and years to reflect on this. Why do you think they rejected you . Having raised you for 12 years, and then sent you away, for no more contact, it seems the most extraordinarily cruel and strange thing to do. They i was going through adolescence. So i was the eldest child in the family, and i was taking biscuits from the tin without saying please and thank you, i was staying out late with my friends. And they had not had an adolescent before. And this is what i think. But you were 12, you werent 16. You werent sniffing glue, or committing serious crimes. No, i wasnt doing that either. They they were. Do you know, they meant to do the best for me, i think, but they were naive. And they were also extremely religious, and they perceived that the devil was working in this equation, and. And yes, thats what they did. It is it is the most immense, complete form of rejection. Yes, and it was complete. I lost everybody. I lost my mother, my father, my sisters, my brothers, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents, my town, my first girlfriend. From that point onwards, i was in no contact with any of the family, ever. And i was placed in the Childrens Homes, with lots of other children who had come from abused families, and et cetera. And you were abused. I mean, there was racism, and there was physical abuse. There was racism, there was physical abuse. I was in Wood End Assessment Centre at 17 years of age, so i was held in a virtual prison for children for about eight months. This notion that you have already talked about, of writing poetry in a sense to store memory, in a way the poems being the witnesses to what you are going through when did that began . Did that began when you are in the Childrens Home . Yes, it began at 12 years of age. I knew what i wanted to be. Ive always been clear i wanted to be a poet. I was very clear about that, and i made a bbc radio documentary where one of the staff in the Childrens Home, one of the cleaners. Cleaners are really interesting people in institutions, because they see everything. They see whats wrong and they see whats right. And because theyre not staff, theyre not social workers, they see everything. Theyre quite an incredible resource to a child, actually. They they should be paid more. But one cleaner said, i remember you in the Childrens Home, and i remember when you were writing, and i remember you scribbling your pieces of paper and throwing them away, and starting again, et cetera. I should say we have discussed this, because you have agreed to do it. I want you to read a poem, because i want people to get a flavour of the poetry, and your voice, as well. And it is called Childrens Home, and it is a very powerful and a very bleak description of what a bit of it felt like. But ijust wonder this sort of poetry, which is somewhat typical of things you have reflected upon in yourlife, and about your past, is this something you wrote long afterwards . When did you write down some of these things, some of these memories . I know that i wrote some of these at the time, and i wrote some of them after leaving care. You know, you really do live your childhood out in your adult life. Its not in your childhood that the abuse of being in care actually comes to life. Its when you leave, and you draw on your childhood as you grow into an adult. Its then that you see the effect that its had on you, and its then that you look back and realise whatever abuses have happened to you. Can we hear this one verse from Childrens Home. Yes, one verse from Childrens Home. We had been given booby trapped timebombs, trigger wires hidden, strapped on the inside. It became a place of controlled explosions, self mutilations, screams, suicide. Of young people returned, return to sender. Half lit dorms of midnight moans. We might well have all been children, but this was never a Childrens Home. Mutilation, screams and suicide. Yes, all of those things happened in the care system. Some of them yes. I mean, you have been through the most extraordinary journey in recent years. Because you, having reflected for so long on what happened to you, you decided you were going to seek some sort of Legal Recourse against the council that lied to you lied you about your own mother, about your own history and identity, and kept you in those homes forfive or six years. And in the course of taking them to court, you had to go through a psychologists report, an in depth sort of forensic look deep into your psyche. Mm hm. That, i imagine, has reintroduced you to so much of the pain that has been inside you for so long. Yes. I would say that, when somebody else takes a look at your life, and they they break it down into into a report, which outlines the damage that was done to you via your childhood, thats quite. Thats quite an event, to read that. Well, ill tell you whats even more extraordinary, is your decision to only see and hear what was in that report live, as it were, on a theatre stage, when a fellow actor played the role of the psychologist, and read the report to you, and you sat in a chair and listened. And it was the first time you have ever heard it, listened to this long exposition of the damage done to you, including the post traumatic stress, the abuse of alcohol, other forms of mental damage that the psychologist found in you, and you took it all in front of an audience, on stage. A one off, completely extraordinary performance. Why did you do that . I did it because other people have been through this process, particularly in wales, and theyve had a psychologists report written about them. And the suicide rate of people whove been through this process is high. So i didnt want that, i didnt want that to happen to me. So i felt safer to hear the report read to me on stage by an actor here in england, julie hesmondhalgh. And ifeel safer on stage than i do elsewhere, is probably the truth. What was it like listening to it . It was quite disturbing, and it. But it was quite liberating, as well, because there were 350 people, 400 people, at the Royal Court Theatre in west london, there just to support me. Just to be with me, just to hold me in mind. It was like being hugged by a nation. It was a beautiful event, and im proud to have done it. I have not looked at the report since then. No, i havent, and i wont. You have talked about how any society can be judged by the way it deals with the children who do not have their own families, who are institutionalised, cared for by the state. You said in 2012 you can define how strong a democracy is by how its government treats this kind of child. I dont mean children, i mean the child of the state. Yes. If you are in care, the government is legally your parents, so. And what does it say about the britain that you have grown up in, your treatment, what happened to you . What does it say . And, you know, children still struggle and suffer in care today. The care system in england stole me from my family. The care worker named me after himself. You were briefly called norman, werent you . 18 years it locked me away as a child. Yes, i wont redress to that. Redress, and that is important, clearly, because you have pursued that with determination. But there is something us about you which fascinates me, the idea of forgiveness. Because as you have conducted your career and becoming a renowned poet, you have been on a long term quest to find family, to find your own birth mother, make sense of her life and her decisions, and the sort of half siblings that you have around the world. I am surprised that you have done that in terms of forgiveness rather than in anger, in a way. Is there no anger in you . I have been angry. I have been incredibly angry. I have been hurt and i have come to realise, well, i am not defined by my scars, but by the incredible ability to heal. And that forgiveness is part of healing, and that it is really important that i forgive my foster parents and i forgive social services here in england that store my motherfrom me, and i should forgive my mother because it is very difficult when an adult child comes back to find you. It was very difficult for her, i think. People watching this would probably want to believe that when you find your birth mother, and when you went back to your foster parents, much later in life, when you became a successful artist, what we would perhaps all like to believe is that you found relationships that were meaningful, that you had found family, in a way, in these two different strands of your life. Did you . I think ive found i think it is complicated when you find your family. My fathers family, and his brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, my mother and her children. We are talking about your birth family, now. The ethiopian family. Are they in your life today . I now know who my family is. The truth is that it is very difficult for them or for me or for any of us to form familial relationships. They are all good people. But it is quite shocking when somebody comes into your family, like me. And in a sense demands a form of truth telling. Families are ok. They want the truth structure just as it is. Unfortunately i challenge that. Does that mean you cant. And i can tell this is extremely difficult for you, but does that mean that you cannot really have long term Close Relationships with these people from your life . You would have to ask them about that. I mean, just imagine somebody coming into your house and standing there and saying 0k, i am now the oldest brother, and by the way, your parents were sleeping with other people at some point in their life that you do not know about, and stuff. And so i think that possibly possibly, i do know, family is about what is not said. It is about not seeing things. It is about holding their collective group in mind. Im somebody who wants answers. My name, lemn, means why in amharic. Ethiopians now know me as the person called why. Having a name like that is a challenge to his family. And i dont know how families work, so i am not very. I am not very equipped to understand the subtleties of family. So no, i dont most of my family dont speak to me. My fathers children and my mothers children, actually, and you know, yes, it is complicated, stephen. Throughout all of this, i have called it a quest. It involved your foster parents and talking to them, too. But through all of us, you have kept writing. It seems to me that there is serving addressing about your creativity and your poetry in particular. You say that you have to live in the moment. You say, you know, i cannot live in the past, and i cannot look too far into the future. I have to be and i have to create in the here and now. And i understand that. And yet so much of your writing, in this sort of anthology and others, is actually about this past. So you do go back all the time in your head. I have to live in the present. Thank you for the reminder. Now we can start the interview. Because that is a survival technique. But the present is actually a product of you coming to terms and coping with and weaving stories about your past. You cannot separate them. If you live in the past, you are not in the present. And you are not alive and real and authentic and true to yourself. I do believe i live in my past. In terms of my writing. I write about what inspires me at the time. And if that includes my time in the Childrens Homes, then that is all well and good, but what happened then affects away now. I think living in the present is a way of living the best life that you can live, and forgiveness is one of the best ways of being able to live in the present, because otherwise you always live in the past. You go through the process of anger, you go through the process of war, and then you have to look at yourself and equip yourself with the process of peace. That is crucial to anyone you communicate with. And if all you have ever had is the defence mechanisms or the fight or flight mechanism, then you how to learn new ways of being true to yourself and those around you. Being in the present is one of the ways to do that. In your young life, you were so much an outsider and so much alone, and i think you reflected on the fact that you did not have anybody who had known you for longer than one year. That is an extraordinarily difficult and isolating place to be in many ways. And now you are an artist who is widely respected and renowned. You have received all sorts of accolades. A gong from the queen. You have your poems inscribed in grenot in london and manchester. You were the official poet of the olympic games. And of course you at the chancellor of manchester university, which is a lovely and highly prestigious thing to be. Do you no longer feel like an outsider . We all feel like an outsider. Forever, whether we are inside or not. It is ok to be an outsider. It gives you a unique perspective. There are tons of us who are outsiders who have lived through the care system and who have become successful, but im successful in spite of what happened to me, not because of what happened to me. So this notion of art, and i reflected on this in the beginning when i reflected on our coming out of dark and painful places, you dont believe that your art was, in a sense that your suffering was a requirement to you to be the others that you are . No, you need to feel a reason to write. That is all you need. It does not have to be about experience. You do not need to have a bad express to be a good artist. Otherwise i would tell people to have a bad experience to become a good artist. We all have stories. One of the things that i treasure is the fact that a story like mine allows me to build bridges to people. And for people to build bridges to me. I dont feel isolated as much as i feel i have a reason to communicate. Allows me to communicate. And that is a gift. That is a gift. Thank you forjoining us on hardtalk. It is an honour, man. Thank you very much indeed. Hello. The day ahead will bring some very windy weather and then we get plunged into the deep freeze. Storm caroline, a deep area of low pressure is drifting to the north of the british isles. A band of rain sinking southwards and eastwards but look at all the white lines, the isobars on the chart, very, very windy, Storm Force Winds are possible in Northern Areas and then we opened the floodgates to this very cold air plunging all the way in from the arctic. Were starting thursday on a fairly mild note, a wet note for some and a windy night for all of us. The mild weather will not last, though, because ours are bands of rain clearing south and east and we will all get into cold air, wintry showers in Northern Ireland and scotland but the real concern here is the strength of the wind. As you can see, were expecting wind gusts in excess of 80mph across northern scotland particularly, and it could well be enough to cause some disruption, yes, but also some damage. So the met office has issued an amber be prepared warning for the strength of the wind, and even further south across central parts of scotland, just fringing into Northern Ireland, a yellow warning in force, gusts of 70mph possible here. Elsewhere starts wet and windy across the south eastern corner, rain will take a while to clear away. Skies will brighten and then we get into the wintry showers blown in on this strong north westerly wind, could easily be blizzard conditions in the snow showers and those temperatures coming down as the afternoon goes on. Now, into thursday night, snow showers will drift further southwards and eastwards. We could see a covering of snow just about anywhere, but mostly in places exposed to this north westerly wind. There could be icy stretches around as well. So a very wintry look to the weather on friday. Yes, some sunshine, still some snow showers, a bitterly cold north westerly will wind, your thermometer will read 2 5 degrees but it will feel subzero for many. Now, saturday looks like it will bring something a little bit quieter, the winds easing from the west. Still very cold but not as many showers at this stage, 1 5, those are the maximum temperatures. Then as we head into the second half of the weekend, its all eyes on this front of system hurtling in from the atlantic. Yes, its going to wring some rain but as it interacts with the cold air theres the potential for some significant snow. Dont take these graphics to seriously, theres questions about these positioning of this, some significant snow possible on sunday and we will keep you posted. Welcome to newsday. Im rico hizon, in singapore. The headlines President Trump overturns decades of us policy and formally recognisesjerusalem as the capital of israel. This is a long overdue step to advance the Peace Process and to work towards a lasting agreement. Israels Prime Minister calls the move historic but palestinian factions call for a general strike and protests. Im karin giannone, in london. Also in the programme one of australias most prominent roman catholics goes on trial, accused of covering up child sexual abuse. The second stage of nepals general election gets underway, after a campaign beset with violence